The Wish Box Read online

  The Wish Box

  Nate Van Dyke

  Copyright © 2018 Nate Van Dyke

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-79-262391-2

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to the folks over at HBE Publishing, particularly Dan Dunklee and Audra Burwell, for the advice and editing. Your encouragement gave me the push I needed to complete my goal.

  Thank you to my friends who read The Wish Box in its early stages and gave me advice, particularly Rachel Kaneversky. Your diligence and attention to detail made the whole process more manageable.

  Thank you to my writing group, Laurel Samuelson, Hailey Millhollen, Francesco Parisi, and Margaret Bowlin, for your support and encouragement! You have been and continue to be my companions in this writing adventure.

  And finally, thank you to all my friends and family who have been there for me all along as I pursued my dream to become a published author!

  To my parents, who encouraged me to pursue my dreams no matter how impossible they seemed. This impossible dream became a reality because of you

  1

  We Get Kidnapped

  GARRETT

  Before we explain our crazy lives, there are a few things you need to know. First off, your world is a lot more complicated than you might think. Imagine if every legend, myth, and folktale you have ever heard was true. Then throw in a few hundred more that you didn’t know about, and that’s a very, VERY simple explanation of why my life is so crazy. Now, onto the story!

  My name is Garrett Kipler. I have shaggy brown hair and I am a little over 6 feet tall. In my free time, I enjoy hiking, playing board games, and fighting to the death (not really). My best friend/brother is Kamaron Kipler. Even though he is my brother, we don’t look at all alike. He is a year older than me, and probably about 6 feet tall, a little on the skinny side, with very short, blond hair. I am a lot heavier built than he is, not to mention taller, which really annoys him. He takes after our mom, with strong, well-built muscles that fit into a lean body. I take more after our dad, with a larger and more muscled figure.

  As far as brothers go, we get along pretty well. Sometimes we fight, but for the most part, we get along better than you might expect. Whenever we do get into trouble though it’s almost always together, which is pretty much how this whole story got started.

  It was my 14th birthday, so my parents threw a “party” that consisted of Kam and a few balloons. The party itself wasn’t much of a party without people there for it, but my parents still tried their hardest. Wow, I thought to myself, all my friends showed up. It wasn’t that people didn’t like me, there just weren’t a lot of people that lived nearby us. We sort of lived off the beaten path, which was the way my parents liked it.

  I should probably tell you a little bit about our parents now that I think about it. Our parents were super awesome. They both had black hair, which is odd because it’s a different color than ours. It probably has to do with recessive genes or some other boring thing like that. They weren’t necessarily rich, but they did have enough money to enjoy themselves. They also had enough to buy a beautiful house in the woods. It was one of those places where you could never run out of things to do. It was a great place to play around, but not so great when it’s time to do chores.

  I don’t know what it is with my parents, but every time one of us has had a birthday they have to do something crazy for it. I feel like they wanted to make up for the lack of friends by going over the top themselves. For example, on Kam’s 9th birthday, they gave us a map with an X on it, and we had to go find where the presents were stashed. It is really cool, but at the same time, sometimes you just want to relax on your birthday. This time, on my 14th birthday, my parents had decided to hide four presents in the woods behind our house. Then they gave us a shovel and sent us off into the woods.

  “A scavenger hunt,” Kam said, “Seriously?” He sounded a little annoyed, but also unsurprised. This was nothing new after all.

  “Ya, I know,” I replied, “but I really want my presents.”

  Kam chuckled, and we started hunting. We found the first three gifts pretty easily. A watch, earphones, and a coffee mug that said Don’t mess with Texas. We didn’t actually live in Texas; my parents were just weird like that. Our family has our own little sense of humor that rarely makes sense to anyone but us. All of the gifts were “hidden” by the loosest definition of the word, which meant one of two things.

  “They are off their game,” I said as we walked. “Either that, or these first three were the easy ones.” I found myself getting a little excited. The harder they were to find, the better they were.

  Kam hefted the shovel, “The last one is probably buried.”

  “Really? I didn’t realize that!” I replied, my voice dripping with sarcasm. He smiled and punched me in the arm, but not hard enough to actually hurt. We kept searching, this time looking more intently at the ground for disturbed dirt.

  Finally, after about 15 minutes, we found a little trail of, well, something leading off into a thicker part of the woods. Now that I think about it, I really can’t describe what the trail was. It was like shiny gold dust, as if a fairy had just flown through the area. At the time, I didn’t think much of it; I was just focused on the clue and figured that my parents had left the gold dust behind.

  When we found where the trail ended, we were in a grassy clearing. There was a bare patch of ground where gold dust stuff seemed to coalesce. Kam and I looked at each other, smiling. I took the first turn digging in the hopes that it would be closer to the surface, but after a dozen shovelfuls of dirt I gave up and handed the shovel to Kam. As he began to dig, I tried to imagine what the present could be. Before long, we heard a satisfying CLUNK!

  “Don’t damage it, Kam!”

  He opened his mouth to reply but got distracted by The Box as he cleared the dirt away. After all of the dirt was cleared off, we both reached in and pulled it out. We stared at it in wonder for a few moments before Kam broke the silence.

  “What are all of these carvings?” he asked, running his fingers over the lid. He was looking at the weird designs covering The Box. “They look like, I dunno, hieroglyphs?” he said.

  I looked down at The Box and saw that he was right! We dusted it off, looking it over. The Box looked like a wooden chest, but pretty small. It was covered in strange symbols, carved right into the wood. It looked like it had been buried there for a while, which seemed a little odd to me. “I wonder where they found this…”

  “Weird,” Kam muttered as he reached to open it. He had barely touched the lid when it popped open. Simultaneously, a gust of wind blew through the field, rustling branches and scattering leaves. “Very weird,” I said, looking around at the movement of the trees and grass. We looked at each other, then inside The Box, but it was completely empty.

  “Great! My fourth present is a box. A cool box, but still, it’s a box!” I said. We gathered up everything and started back towards the house. Kam was still focused on The Box, looking at the symbols quizzically like trying to read them. He was always fascinated by historical looking things, so it didn’t surprise me. I, on the other hand, was not at all interested in The Box. It wasn’t like it wasn’t cool, or I didn’t appreciate it, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I had gotten my hopes up, and they were just dashed.

  “Still no pellet gun,” I said disappointedly. “I wish mom and dad would just decide that I was old enough already.” Kam stayed silent next to me, though I knew that he agreed. He didn’t have to say anything because we had had this conversation multiple times in the past.

  I had wanted a pellet gun for a few years, and every year around my birthday I would beg my parents to get me one. And every year their answer was the same: “You need
to mature a little bit more before we give you and your brother a dangerous weapon.” I had thought that this year might be different because they hadn’t specifically said no. My parents always taught us to never lie and they lived that out themselves. That being said, they were still very good at getting us to believe something without ever directly telling a lie. I was hoping this was one of those cases, but it appeared that I had gotten my hopes up for nothing.

  My sour mood did not improve at all with 20 minutes of walking. As we jogged up the steps to the door, it flew open! There were my grinning parents, holding a huge pellet gun with a big red bow and more balloons. In the back of my head, I thought, That’s weird; they have never given me a present like this before. Kam, who was probably thinking the same thing, raised his eyebrow at me.

  “We have decided you are old enough,” my mom said, while my dad handed me the gun with a package of pellets. Kam’s eyebrow went up a little more. I thought about asking what changed their minds, but I decided I didn’t want to jinx it.

  “Thank you! Let’s go try it out!” I yelled excitedly. We ran past my parents and back to my room to drop the other presents off. We set them all on the bed in a pile, completely forgetting them. Even The Box drifted into the back of our minds and all of the weirdness surrounding it was displaced by pure excitement. After dropping all of that off, Kam and I sprinted full speed out of the house and back into the woods. My mom yelled something after us as we ran by her, probably something about being careful, but I could tell by her cheerful tone that she wasn’t actually too concerned.

  We kept running until we were out of earshot and then slowed to a walk. We walked in silence for a little bit before Kam finally burst. “Dude! That is crazy! Our parents are awesome! When are they going to get me one?! That thing is so cool! Let me look at it!” Kam said all of this in a rapid-fire way, which is how he tends to get when he is excited. I passed it to him, laughing, but I still felt that something wasn’t quite right.

  We messed around for a while, shooting at trees and going a little farther into the woods. We would take turns choosing a target and then see who could get the closest to the center of it. Our first few shots were far off the mark, but after a little practice, we were both getting pretty good. We started to get a lot more competitive with it, as brothers tend to do, and began to lose track of our surroundings. We did this for over an hour before we finally stumbled upon something that pulled our attention away from the gun.

  While I was taking a turn with the gun, Kam suddenly grabbed my arm and pointed at the ground under my feet. I followed his gaze and noticed some very obviously disturbed dirt. I knew precisely what Kam was thinking, and without saying anything, both of us began to dig with our hands. We didn’t have a shovel, but luckily the dirt was pretty loose, so we were able to get through it with just our bare hands. It wasn’t long before I saw something white sticking out from under the dirt. I wedged my hand under it, pulled it out, shook the excess dust off, and discovered that it was a small box with an Mp3 player inside! I stared at it for a few seconds, processing what it was and what it meant.

  Kam looked at me and said what I was thinking, “I think THAT is the fourth present. The Box wasn’t something that was hidden by our parents for us to find! We need to take a closer look at it!”

  I nodded my agreement and, without another word, we ran at full speed back to the house. To my surprise, the sun was already going down when we caught sight of the house. We had really lost track of time while we were messing around with the pellet gun. We bounded up the steps and through the door without slowing, making a beeline for my room. “No running in the house!” my mom called cheerfully as we ran past the kitchen. We didn’t even slow to give a snarky reply and continued right past the living room and our very surprised dad. We finally came to a stop just inside the door of my room.

  Unlike most teens my age, my room was kind of dull. No posters of celebrities or movies or anything, just a dresser next to the door, two nightstands, and a bed pushed against the far wall. In our hurry, we had thrown The Box on the bed with the other presents. We walked over to The Box and opened it, and once again a strange gust of wind blew through the house. I heard my mom shout from somewhere in the house that we left the door open, which I was confident was wrong, but there were more pressing matters at hand. Kam, being the superstitious type, looked like a light bulb had just activated in his head. He grabbed my shoulder to get my attention and said, “Wish for something.”

  I met his eyes, confused for a second about what he was asking. Once it clicked, I just replied, “You’re crazy!” I would have shrugged it off with that, but Kam looked more scared than I had ever seen him, which scared me. He may be ridiculous on occasion, but very few things legitimately scare him. He kept staring at me as if waiting for me to burst into flames, and I finally got so annoyed that I said, “I wish you would stop looking at me!”

  He instantly looked away. I frowned, now more annoyed than concerned, because I thought he was playing a joke on me. “I wish you wou—” I started to say, but he cut me off, “Stop it, moron! Don’t you understand?” He still didn’t look at me.

  I was still convinced he was playing a prank, until he said, “I wish you would hop on one foot, and I wish I could look at you again.” Just like that, he looked at me, and I began to hop on one foot. I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. Have you ever tried to stop itching a bug bite, but couldn’t? That’s kind of what it felt like. I wanted with all of my willpower to not hop on one foot, but for whatever reason I could not force myself to stop. It was the weirdest, most terrifying thing I had ever felt.

  “Now do you see? Oh, and I wish you didn’t have to hop on one foot,” Kam said. I was finally able to stop hopping, which brought relief and the beginning of understanding on what Kam was getting at. Anything that we wished for would happen. It reminded me of one of those stories where some kids find a genie, and then they get big heads and wish for stupid things. I was thinking of some stupid things I wanted to wish for when Kam did the annoying brother thing and read my mind.

  “Don’t even think about it! We don’t even know how it works!” he said.

  “Well, what do we do then?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth to reply, but before any of the words could get out, one of the hieroglyphs glowed brightly and exploded in light! The light was so bright that it hurt my eyes. I had to blink a few times before I could see again. When the spots in my eyes finally faded, I could see a figure standing in front of us. It had a human body, way taller than Kam or me, with the head of a snarling canine. Its upper body was completely bare, allowing us to get a good view of the enormous muscles covering his chest and arms. His lower half was covered by some sort of old-fashioned skirt, which was fine by me.

  The creature was probably close to eight feet tall, so tall that the tops of its ears brushed the ceiling. It also had some wicked knives in its hands. They had serpentine curves, with jeweled handles and golden blades. The part that worried me the most though was the weird flames dancing around them. Unlike normal fire, it was all sorts of colors. The rainbow fire didn’t seem to bother him, but I could feel the heat coming off of them from across the room. I took in all of this information in a moment, though I wasn’t even sure whether I believed what I was perceiving.

  The next moment after I had this thought, I had a flashback to hundreds of fights with this creature. Along with the memories came a name that sent shivers down my back. It was called Bakshazani, a name that was given to it thousands of years ago in a language that had gone extinct shortly after. How I knew any of this, I have no idea, but I knew without a doubt that all of it was true. It was like a memory of my own experiences, though I knew logically that it couldn’t possibly be.

  The Bakshazani was blinking as if it had been suddenly awoken from an afternoon nap. When it focused on us, it was obviously really angry to have been woken up. “Death to those who would release the spirits!” bellowed the beast as he swung his fi
ery blades.

  Apparently, he—it—whatever, was still a little woozy from the bright light teleportation act because the blades whistled above our heads. We still had to duck to avoid the intense heat coming from the blades but got away unscathed. He gave a triumphant snarl, which was cut short when he realized that he had missed. He looked down at us, surprised and annoyed that we had survived his attack, and roared, “Argh! Curse you for disturbing my slumber!”

  Kam and I looked at each other and simultaneously yelled, “Run!” I was a great idea, until we ran headfirst into my mom. She walked in saying, “What’s with all the noi—whoa!” That last part was my fault, as I simultaneously knocked her over and tripped over her. I tried to catch my balance and my mom, but Kam ran into me from behind and we all tumbled into the hallway together.

  Being on the ground with a crazy knife-wielding creature behind us would have been a bad thing, but looking back on it now, I think it saved our lives. The Bakshazani pounced at us as we fell and sailed over our heads, right through the wall that separated the hallway and the living room. My dad was standing in the living room, probably to figure out what all the noise was, and was completely dumbfounded by the sudden appearance of a very large dog. He opened his mouth to say something, but before anyone could react, the beast recovered and swung its blades! Rather than cutting him, the blades simply passed through my father, causing him to fade to darkness and evaporate. It was like he was never there; just black dust thrown into the wind.

  I was so stunned, I couldn’t move! Faster than I thought possible, the dog thing whirled on us and I realized that our sleepy advantage was gone. It snarled something about killing us, but before it could finish, Kam yelled, “I wish I had a shotgun!”

  I liked that idea and was about to copy the wish, but a bow and quiver popped out of the air and landed in his hands! “That is NOT what I asked for!” Kam exclaimed.